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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The 33rd annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike competition at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, Fla., kicks off Thursday. The stoically bearded among us will go head to head in the fiercely competitive three-day tournament to win the coveted title of "Papa." Last year, Florida defense attorney Frank Louderback was so eager to compete that he asked a judge to postpone a murder-for-hire trial so he could take part. The judge, however, was unimpressed. In her denial of the motion, she wrote: "Between a murder-for hire trial and an annual look-alike contest, surely Hemingway, a perfervid admirer of 'grace under pressure' would choose the trial," adding, "Or at least, isn't it pretty to think so?"

The good name of Jonathan Franzen was besmirched Tuesday when one Jesse Montgomery of the blog Full Stop claimed she saw the author pretending to be a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in an attempt to rent movies from the library: "It was then that the 2001 National Book Award winner began a fraudulent attempt to rent films from the library's audio visual department and perhaps defraud the state of California." Franzen maintains his innocence. In response to an inquiry from NPR, he wrote, somewhat grumpily, "The dialogue the author reproduces is totally inaccurate. I never represented that I was a student. And I do have a valid UCSC library card, because I'm a fellow of Cowell College. But it's true that I was there in the media center last week."

NW author Zadie Smith's next book will be a "science-fiction romp" (a romp!). The London Standard says, "As for her own next move, she says it will be a total departure: a science-fiction romp. She has been reading a lot of Ursula K Le Guin. 'It's a concept novel. It's the only novel I've ever written that has a plot, which is thrilling. I don't know if I can do it. Those books are incredibly hard to write.' "

Open City author Teju Cole recalls for Granta the experience of being robbed in Lagos, Nigeria: "What I feel each time I enter the country is not a panic, exactly; it is rather a sense of fragility, of being more susceptible to accidents and incidents, as though some invisible veil of protection had been withdrawn, and fate, with all its hoarded hostility, could strike at any time."

In The Guardian, author Michael Cunningham compares Virginia Woolf and James Joyce: "To the Lighthouse doesn't slay and pillage in the same way, yet it is every bit as revolutionary as Ulysses, and for some of the same reasons. Like Joyce, Woolf knew the entire world could be seen by looking not only at the big picture, but also the small one, in more or less the way a physicist who studies subatomic particles is witness to miracles every bit as astonishing as those observed by an astronomer."

Sixties pop artist Tom Wesselmann liked women, and saluted them on his canvases — or, sometimes, just parts of them: perfect glossy red mouths with lips parted to reveal pink tongues; nipples, even on the oranges he paints. These are just a few of the images that might make you blush in a Wesselmann retrospective now on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

"I don't think you could ask for a more literal interpretation of the objectification of parts of the female body," says curator Sarah Eckhardt.

Before these large works focusing only on closely observed individual body parts, Wesselmann painted a series of full nudes, sprawling indiscreetly against patriotic backgrounds with red, white and blue stripes, and some stars.

The Great American Nude series was Wesselmann's best-known work. Painted in the 1960s, the large canvases featured the colors of Old Glory, sprawly nudes, and on the walls behind them, pasted clippings from magazines: a portrait of George Washington, a photograph of JFK, a reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, the Mona Lisa. What's going on here?

Curator Sylvia Yount says Wesselmann was paying tribute to an artistic tradition: "[He was] putting himself into that larger pantheon of artists who are dealing with the mainstay of art history: the female nude."

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In early 2002, a pair of battered old trucks drove through deep snow into a tiny Alaska ghost town carrying a large family that looked to be from another century.

The patriarch, with his long, unruly beard, introduced himself to one of the town's few residents as Papa Pilgrim (though his real name was Robert Hale). Long before, he explained, a shaft of celestial light had brought him a big-bang religious awakening and now God had whispered to him, telling him to move with his wife and family to Alaska. All 15 Pilgrim children had been delivered and schooled at home. They had names like Hosanna, Jerusalem, Psalms and Job; they didn't use calendar months; they addressed their father as "Lord"; and they'd never seen a TV, or experienced the temptations of the world.

Most of us are familiar with that hot, musky-smelling, cloudy drink served in teacups at sushi bars and sometimes called, erroneously, "rice wine." In other words, most of us have had bad sake.

But finally, Americans are learning to love the good stuff.

Imports of high-end sake from Japan are escalating, and countless sake-focused bars and restaurants in cities across the country are carrying hundreds of bottles each. Savvy gourmands are pairing sake with cheese and chocolate. Mixologists are making sake cocktails. Portland, Ore., has hosted a sake festival three summers in a row.

Perhaps best of all, Americans are now making their own sake. SakeOne, in Portland, has been doing so since the 1990s and now sells almost 1 million bottles per year. Much more recently, microbreweries have begun appearing in garages, warehouses and restaurant kitchens across America, turning white pearls of rice into Japan's most famous table beverage.

Several such operations are already in business, while a half-dozen others are gearing up to go. In Asheville, N.C., two microbreweries may be just weeks away from launching: Blue Kudzu and Ben's American Sake.

The latter will be based out of an izakaya-ramen restaurant called Ben's Tune-Up. Co-owner and brewer Jonathan Robinson says that, in a local market saturated with craft beers, sake helps his place stand out.

"I wouldn't want to be opening a brewery now," Robinson tells The Salt. "Everyone is making beer now, and here a lot of people have been brewing for 20 years. But with sake, we're breaking new ground."

Ben's American Sake will be brewed onsite and served on tap. The bar list will include a sake infused with honey and kumquats, as well as a carbonated, bubbly sake. Robinson also has plans to borrow a trick from the specialty beer world to make a decidedly nontraditional brew: bourbon barrel-aged sake.

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